Editorial: Mental health a crisis in state's prisons

The state Department of Corrections shouldn't be allowed to spend any more money fighting federal oversight of mental health programs within the state prisons. Gov. Brown should insist instead that the department put all available resources into immediate improvements in mental health and finding ways to stop foisting overly difficult and dangerous inmates off on county jails.

Last week, soon after federal Judge Lawrence Karlton rejected the state's petition to take mental treatment back from the feds, a department spokesman said the state would appeal rather than redoubling efforts to provide humane and meaningful treatment for dangerously troubled inmates.

Brown has said the money being spent on lawyers should be spent on efforts to rehabilitate inmates. Apparently he needs to be reminded of that.

The debate between the state and the federal courts involves provision of basic psychiatric care to inmates with a variety of mental conditions and to others sent to prison facilities in an effort to make them sane enough to stand trial. In all, about 33,000 inmates, nearly a third of the total population, are considered severely mentally ill.

Psychiatrists at Salinas Valley State Prison in Soledad and elsewhere have complained of critical staffing shortages that have eroded mental health programs. Inmate advocates have demonstrated prison psychiatric resources are so slight that prisoners sent to group therapy programs frequently spend hours locked in one-person cages. Not surprisingly, the suicide rate in California's prisons is significantly higher than the national average.

While state officials maintain the quality of care meets the basic standards required under the Constitution, federal officials argue the state has been too slow to make improvements that it agreed to in 2009.

This isn't an argument about the thickness of mattresses or the size of cellblock televisions. It is about finding ways to provide meaningful treatment to especially troubled inmates who often spend as much as 23 hours a day locked in cells with little to entertain themselves except their demons.